


New Books

by ashesandhoney



Series: Jessa In the New Millennium [3]
Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 23:12:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1796809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tessa and Jem hanging out at home after Tessa received a huge shipment of books from an old warlock friend of her's. They're kind of cute but nothing much happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Books

 

Jem Carstairs woke in an empty bed. That in itself was unusual but as he lay in the nest of blankets and looked up at the ceiling he heard a noise. He pushed himself up on his elbows and listened again. Rustling and thumping from the other room. He kicked off the blankets and climbed out of bed. The curtains were partially open because she couldn't get up without looking out at the view. The ceilings in this part of the apartment were twelve feet and the window filled most of that on the exterior wall. He pushed back the heavy green drapery and looked down at the city.

                It was a Tuesday and the streets far below were filled with early morning traffic. New York's commuters and yellow taxi cabs vying for space. They were high enough and the glass was thick enough that he couldn't hear a sound. The sound and fury of the city was one of his favourite things about this apartment. Tessa had a surprisingly large collection of real estate scattered around the world from a cottage on the Welsh coast and a London Townhouse to a flat in Mexico City and a place in a hyper modern Shanghai apartment complex. She'd mentioned Florence and Prague and Cairo but they hadn't made it there yet.

                The bedroom and the main sitting room in this apartment were sunken in order to allow for those huge windows and he had to climb the stairs to get to the main hallway. He didn't bother with slippers or a shirt, he couldn't hear voices. The hallway led along to a large open space. On the upper side was a huge kitchen with a dining area and below that was a sitting room that had quickly become his favourite place on the planet. It smelled like coffee and lavender and cedar. He leaned on the railing separating the two and looked down at the chaos.

                "What happened here?" he asked.

                Tessa was sitting in the middle of one of the two couches with a huge cardboard box on the coffee table in front of her. The furniture was the source of the cedar smell and the huge coffee table with its uneven edges was usually stacked with books but not this many.

                "Nat sent me a box," she said.

                "Nat?" he asked. He had to cross to the front door to get to the stairs down into the room. He could have made the jump but it would had disturbed the piles of books and that was dangerous when she was focused like this. It looked like a jumble but it was probably well planned. The pile on the table meant something different from the pile on the sofa beside her, meant something different from the pile on the floor at her feet.

                "Natasha," she said. "We trained together in Eastern Europe. She had just discovered that immortality was part of the package deal with the blue skin and horns. She needed a mentor, I needed someone to practice with. I'll introduce you the next time she's on the continent. She finds the best spell books. There are some spell books in Moscow that you'd never find anywhere else. There are entire shops and libraries full of them."

                "So that's a box of spell books," he said.

                "Among other things. Nat sends anything she thinks I'll like," Tessa said. He skirted the piles to come and stand beside her and she finally looked up at him instead of the cover of the huge leather bound book in her hands. She grinned at him like his being there was the best surprise imaginable. He returned the smile and leaned down to pull her face up for a kiss. Her hair was down making a wild curtain around her face and he pushed his fingers back through it.

                "You really are beautiful," he said.

                "As are you, gorgeous," she said with a laugh. He pulled away from her and picked up one of the piles and shifted it further down the couch so he could sit beside her. She was wearing a yellow tank top and a pair of white cotton shorts and his Victorian sensibilities were briefly shocked by the sheer amount of skin he could see. The shirt was riding up a little bit so he could see a strip of her lower back when she leaned forward to put down the book. He leaned close and looked over the box in front of her. She shifted just a bit so that she could lean her shoulder against his, skin to skin and he smiled at her.

                "Do you read Cyrillic?" he asked reaching into the box to pull out a paper back.

                "God no, Nat thinks if she keeps sending me books that I'll eventually learn. I can't even speak Russian, let alone read it. I don't even know if this is Russian or Ukrainian or something else entirely," she said looking at the book in his hand.

                "What do you do with them?" he asked.

                "Sort them and then put them away," she said.

                "Where?" he asked waving a hand at the book shelf. The book shelf covered the full twelve foot space and ran from railing to window, over ten feet wide. It had books squeezed in on top or double shelved where they were small enough. It was huge and had no more space for the piles that surrounded them. It looked like the overstuffed bookshelves he remembered from Will’s room.

                "Here and there," she said with a smile.

                "Tell me," he said nudging her shoulder and she shoved him back laughing.

                "The ones I don't want go to a used book shop down in Greenwich. The ones in languages I can't speak go to an immigrant welcome center in the Bronx. They've been open since the 1940s. There are staff there who remember my mother," she said.

                "Your mother?" he said. "Oh, your mother of course and you look so much like she did at your age.

                "Well yes, they don't know my real mother," she said. "Some of the spell books I'll hang onto here. That's that pile on the table beside the box. The pile on the floor is spell books to go into storage, either things I don't want right now or stuff I've already got copies of. The pile there," she leaned across him to pat the pile that he had moved and then slid back, "That's fiction and poetry that I want to read." He loved the little ways that she would touch him.

                "Doesn't fix the space problem," he said.

                "I have lots of places to leave books," she said.

                "In all the apartments," he asked.

                "No, I mean there are some in the apartments. I've got a collection like this in London too but mostly they're in the magic libraries," she said with a laugh. "And all the spell books go to a huge flat I have in Prague. It's got four bedrooms and it is all spell books, rooms of them. It's a library in and of itself. I lend them out even."

                "Wait, magic libraries? Should I know what a magic library is?" he asked.

                "The magic libraries are famous. They're like shadowhunter folklore. No? A long time ago, I asked Cece if I could leave some books at Ravenscar Manor. Her parents left it to her and it’s still in the Lightwood family. It's actually the only piece of property that they still hold in England, the Clave took everything else after the debacle with the Circle. Ravenscar's ownership is murky and they were too busy to untangle it. They call it the magic library because things just appear. I know that Alec has heard the stories. When a great uncle became Inquisitor an entire new set of Shadowhunter Law books appeared in the library and no one in the family had bought them. Things appear and disappear. The books sometimes rearrange themselves. The younger kids think it's all stories," she said.

                "And it's you," he said.

                "Well, they won't all fit here," she said. "The Herondale house in Idris is the other one. They've got more fiction though because it started as Will’s collection. We used to send books there when we were traveling. It was some of the first magic I ever learned how to do. A lot of the Ravenscar books are useful ones. They have a beautiful collection of collected faerie tales from around the world. It's one of my favourite books. I think it took 10 years to collect them all. There were a few at Lucie's for awhile too but the Blackthorns sold the house and donated 90% of them sometime around the end of the second world war."

                "You hide books in Shadowhunter libraries," he said with a laugh. “That sounds like Will’s idea.”

                "Sending books back was his idea. I wonder what he’d think if he knew I was still doing it,” she said tossing a paper back onto a pile destined for the donation bin.

                “He’d love that you were still doing it. He’d probably want a list of everything you’d ever sent so he could make a reading list out of it,” Jem said.  “He’d love magic libraries with new books hidden in them.”

“It's not so much hiding and I had permission. Besides it’s pretty obvious. Sometimes I just leave them on tables," she argued and handed him a book "Put that one with the other ones beside you.”

“You had permission a hundred years ago," he said.

                "Permission is permission. Though, I sometimes imagine Robert Lightwood tearing up the carpet in the library finding the summoning circle carved into the floor and having a fit. I can't decide if it would be hilarious or terrifying," she said.

                "You carved it into the floor? Why?" he asked.

                "That's how I get the books in and out. Chalked circles rub off. There are circles in both libraries, the shelves are marked and my books all have a mark in them too. I can call them to me or send them there," she said. "Cecily helped me lay it down and Will helped with the Herondale one. I could probably do it without the circles now but I wasn't that good at magic back then so I needed the circles to make it work. They still help, it's easier."

                She laughed at the look he gave her and slid forward to the edge of the couch to dig into the depths of the box. He was impressed and surprised and wondered how big that collection of books would be if they were ever in one place. He readjusted and slid in to sit behind her. He had to half lift her with an arm around her waist in order to get her settled against him. He held her as she continued digging through her piles just enjoying having her this close.

                She would twisted around and show him things: a leather bound collection of TS Eliot poems, spell book that specialized in healing spells, a collection of oral histories about vampires in the Balkans. She pulled out a stack of Russian poets in translation and flipped though them slowly. Her knee was tossed over his as she read him a few lines of a poem by Innokénty Ánnensky about a violin.

‘How deep and dark the delirium!

How clouded the moonlit heights!

To have touched the violin so long

yet not know the strings in the light!

 

                "So many sad poets," he said.

                "So many happy ones too," she said. "I don't know if you can be truly happy until you've been sad."

                "Are you happy?" he asked.

                "Right now?" she said

                "Yeah," he said.

                "Right now, I can't imagine being happier than this," she said.

                "Me neither," he said and leaned in to kiss the side of her neck as she nestled into him, the book still in her hand.


End file.
